


An Awfully Big Adventure

by tortoisegirl



Category: Homestuck
Genre: Action/Adventure, Archaeology, Gen, Lusii, Lusus-Troll Relationship, Mother-Daughter Relationship
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2012-12-28
Updated: 2012-12-28
Packaged: 2017-11-22 17:30:27
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 4,176
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/612382
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/tortoisegirl/pseuds/tortoisegirl
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Aradia disobeys her lusus in the name of adventure.</p>
            </blockquote>





	An Awfully Big Adventure

**Author's Note:**

  * For [Xaien](https://archiveofourown.org/users/Xaien/gifts).



Aradia is five and half sweeps old and by her last count has a collection of troll and lusus bones 67 specimens strong, stashed in the room at the very top of her hive, and she has never seen the ocean. 

And though she has never seen the ocean she still has her favorite place to be, on her knees three feet below grasslevel, clearing dirt from the pale surface of what will be her 68th specimen. The night is clear and bright with moonlight, and if she were the kind of person to believe in luck she'd say that tonight's dig site is a lucky one. There's a swell of anticipation that's been churning her insides since early this evening, and it comes to a crest as a long, sweeping horn is revealed from under the dirt.

"Look at this!" she calls over her shoulder, and Kangaram-mom's head pops up from a ditch a few yards away. 

She's pretty sure this is the 68th. Whenever Nepeta comes over the two of them sit under the sloped roof of the attic sorting and counting and identifying her collection, the new bones piled on the floor and the old ones lined up on shelves, worn just a little bit smoother from the number of times they've been handled, and last time the count was 67. This one, Aradia and her lusus discover as they chip away at the hard-packed dirt, is a skull. The mandible is gone and all the teeth are missing. It's split diagonally across the vault of the cranium so that much of the left side is gone, but the bent horn is still anchored to the bone to the right of the break. It is huge, incredibly so as they begin digging around and under it, freeing it from the ground, and in better condition than she could have dreamed, considering. Aradia finds she can't stop grinning. She'd had a guess about this one ever since the shape emerged, and now with her lusus bouncing up and down at her side, white fur all patchy with brown dirt, she confirms it as the skull of a virgin mother grub. 

Kangaram-mom bends close to inspect it, then straightens up, jumpy with excitement, and bumps her nose to Aradia's temple. Then she makes a sound that if she were a troll would be a laugh, and nuzzles joyously against Aradia. Aradia's smile is big enough to split her face, and she laughs and scratches behind her guardian's horns. 

They have it three quarters of the way dug up when Kangaram-mom insists on stopping to eat. Aradia climbs from the trench with a camera full of pictures and a husktop full of notes, and between bites of her sandwich babbles about telling her friends, about sending the pictures to Kanaya and her lusus as soon and they can and maybe inviting them out here to see it, which makes Kangaram-mom bleat contentedly. Aradia sits cross-legged with her dusty skirt pulled over her knees, her lusus behind her combing out the tangles in her hair with her claws (probably getting dirt all through it too, grubby as they both are). The night is clear and bright and beautiful. Their hive is a dim light floating just below the horizon line, and even the distant buildings of the city are hidden away by the hills. The pink moon is a huge spotlight dousing everything in rose, with its green twin lower in the sky tinting the edges of the grass with its color. It feels like they are at the center of the world, just the two of them, covered in dirt and surrounded by bones, the buzz of insects rising from the sea of grassland all around them. Aradia inhales the scent of soil in a deep breath and asks: _can we go on an exploratory mission to the seaside?_

Kangaram-mom makes such an alarmed noise Aradia almost wants to giggle, and she might have, if it were any other situation. But her lusus is shaking her head, and violently.

Aradia's stomach drops. 

“But why not?” she cries, on her feet and defensive all at once. “I want to go to the cliffs past Vriska’s hive - we were near there for our last FLARP campaign and Terezi said she saw a cave-"

No, her lusus is shaking her head. No.

“But she said there were glyphs at the cave’s opening, and there could be more inside!”

Kangaram-mom shakes her head even more ferociously, holding herself aggressively tense. Highbloods, she's telegraphing, Aradia can see. Seadwellers. Dangerous, too far from home, and it’s not meant for us, the sea and its shore. 

“Just because you’re afraid," Aradia insists, persistent, "doesn’t mean I am. I was right near there last week with Tavros and Vriska and Terezi and nothing happened.”

But no, and now her lusus is gathering Aradia’s tools from the grass and shoving them in her pouch. 

"But I’ve never gotten to explore the seashore before...” Aradia tries. She doesn't like how plaintive her voice sounds. If they'd gone to one of the underground tombs tonight, perhaps, she could stand tall with relics crushed beneath her feet and her argument echoing loud and resolute off the walls. But here in the field the wind makes her voice thin and desperate, and facing down her straight-backed lusus with the massive skull of yet another guardian at her feet, Aradia feels small. 

Kangaram-mom lowers her head then and delivers a headbutt to Aradia’s midsection.

“But—”

Another headbutt, making Aradia stumble backwards in the direction of the hive; we’re going home. Now. 

Resentment claws up her throat. She feels like a gun that wants to go off but has jammed mid-firing. She feel like when she was young and full of newfound psychic energy she had no outlet for. Her muscles are tensed to the point of shaking, but Kangaram-mom pushes past her towards the hive without a backward glance, and that just makes her angrier. 

Aradia does go home eventually, slinking in with rancor coming off her like smoke past her lusus who's thankfully asleep, or pretending to be. But for now she waits for her lusus to go inside, then climbs to the roof of her hive. She sits at the base of the windmill, where the room that holds her collection would be right below her, with soured dreams of adventure running through her head and she imagines that from up here, if it were clear enough, she could see all the places she's never been.

\------

"She's being unfair!" Aradia pouts, morosely scraping a trowel over the ground without enthusiasm. 

Behind and above her, perched on a block of stone as tall as he is, Sollux props his chin on his knuckles. "I don't know, she kind of has a point," he says, which makes Aradia frown. He could at least make a token attempt at sympathy before siding against her. "The seadwellers we know are alright I guess, but even Eridan has some bugfuck crazy ideas about killing all landdwellers, so who knows what the ones who aren't our friends would be like? What happens if you run into some gillface who has it out for lowbloods? Or even just some dumb, hungry animal? Then you're shit out of luck, and no one who matters would give a steaming turd of a fuck about it."

"What if there's more than glyphs?" she presses, doing her best to ignore him. "What if there's actual artifacts? That whole shore might have been underwater at some point, sea trolls might have actually lived in those caves! I don't have anything from seadweller civilizations in my collection yet." 

"For fuck's sake, Aradia, are you even listening to yourself? There has to be be all kinds of stuff to satisfy your archeology boner right around here, so why not just keep digging around your hive? The ocean is a bad idea."

Aradia huffs and hunches further into herself. She shouldn't be taking it out on him, she knows - he's the whole reason she was even allowed this far out, in a patch of forest about a mile from her hive. Her lusus restricted her to places within earshot of the hive since their row about the ocean, but Sollux chose this location, and Kangaram-mom agreed to it in deference to their guest. It's the sprawling ruin of what used to be a massive hive, dilapidated and overgrown, little more than some crumbling walls and the half-buried stones of the foundation. 

Aradia thinks Sollux chose it because the towering trees remind him of the hivestems where he lives, safely enclosing him against all the open wilderness. 

Though the trees tell her it's an old ruin too, since they had time to grow as tall as they are right up against what were once the outer walls of the hive, which would normally excite Aradia. But today gloominess surrounds her like a cloud of dust, which translates into boredom for Sollux, which is the opposite of what she wanted for this visit. "You think everything's a bad idea," she grumbles weakly.

"That's because it is. I know you don't believe me about being doomed. But I'm telling you, we are - especially you and me, for a lot of reasons, and not believing it isn't going to make it any less real. And, okay, just because you can see your own doom waiting ahead of you doesn't mean you have to go poke it with a stick. Or with an archeologists pick in your case, I guess."

"That's dumb. Maybe all your dumb doom voices are saying is that we should do what we want because there's no way to change anything that's going to happen. If we're all doomed and I can't do anything about it then I might as well go to the sea!" 

"What are your voices saying about it?"

Aradia takes a breath and - reluctantly - lets go of enough of her bad mood that she can focus as she exhales, so she can allow herself to listen. "Nothing, really," she says after a moment. "There's just mutters and whispers and nothing strong enough to mean anything. It's been that way for days. You'd think they'd be louder about it if I were about to die, right?" With a frustrated sound Aradia finally gives in to her apathy, dropping the trowel. Sollux catches it before it hits the ground in a buzz of psionics. She watches him flip and twirl it around, head in her hand, and muses, "Sometimes I wonder if she hears voices too and doesn't tell me. She's starting to sound a lot like you with how nervous she gets about everything." 

"Hey, fuck that noise. I'm not nervous, I just maintain a healthy amount of realism about how shitty our lives could be." The trowel bops the side of her head; Aradia finally cracks a smile as she bats it away. "It's not like I don't get where you're coming from. It's like before you can raise a grub they make sure each lusus is certifiably insane and irritating enough to make their kid want to flip their shit completely off the handle someday. But, they do know more about the world and stuff, right? Don't get me wrong, my lusus makes me want to rip out my own hearducts to avoid listening to the drivel spewing from this mouth half the time. But they can be right about some things."

Aradia irritably snatches the trowel from the air and jams it into the ground, then immediately regrets it when it rings against something that isn't dirt. She winces as she starts removing shovelfuls of dirt, hoping she didn't damage whatever it is. She should know better than to be rough, no matter her mood.

Sollux has come to crouch beside her (but not to kneel in the dirt like her, afraid to get his clothes dirty, silly boy), and she shoots him a smile and a "Look!" as she picks up something flat and metallic and covered in small, dirt-logged components between her fingertips. "It's a motherboard from an old computer! It's probably from the Silicon Age." 

"Woah," Sollux says. He holds it delicately in his palms when Aradia hands it to him. "That is so cool."

The sour mood between them dissipates after that, lost as Aradia takes up her trowel and Sollux takes up a brush and they start exploring in earnest. (Aradia eventually convinces him to get down in the dirt the way a proper adventurer should, and laughs at him every time he futilely attempts to brush the dirt from his pants.)

By the time Sollux leaves for home Aradia has a respectable haul of bones and relics. Sollux leaves carrying the motherboard wrapped in an old tshirt, and afterward Aradia goes alone to the dig site of the virgin mother grub skull, where it has stayed untouched since the night they found it, and finishes digging it up.

Huge as it is, it must have been a young creature - the horn alone would be bigger than her whole body in an adult but this one is barely longer than her leg. She hefts it up with both arms wrapped around it, and under its weight and bulk something rebellious swells in her, and she turns westwards towards the coast. Because she is five and a half sweeps old, and she can carry the shattered skull of a great and terrible beast under her arm, and she wants to see the ocean.

\-----

She sets out an hour after nightfall and half an hour after her lusus leaves, traveling westward along with the moons. The coast is hours away on foot. Her lusus is gone on a supply run to the city, which, though she promised to be back as soon as possible, is always a full night's trip. Aradia had stood in the doorway to wish her well as she hopped away, thinking of all the adventuring supplies to bring as she waved goodbye. Her feet ache the further she gets from home, but with the shore growing ever closer she does not feel guilty.

She smells the sea before she sees it. She stands on the hills above the beach staring over the roaring water with its salty, organic scent in her nose, which is nothing like the smell of the grass and soil back home. She is on a time limit, she has to remind herself, like a pinch to the arm to keep herself on track - she could watch it all night, this boundless, awesome thing that she is seeing for the first time, that has her heart in her throat. But the moons are already high in the sky behind a layer of clouds, and the nearby cliffs are calling to her. 

Before this the closest she'd come to walking on sand was loamy soil and she finds that the real thing, which shifts underfoot and sucks at her boots, is harder to navigate. The ocean is to her left and to her right is the cliff that rises in a sheer wall as she leaves the gentle slope of the sand dunes behind. Aradia pauses once to crane her neck and look at it, and she wonders how many bones are buried there. The stretch of beach ends abruptly with the cliff swinging out into the water and this is her destination, just as Terezi told her, where the waves smash right up against the rock. The water is much more violent here than it is rolling onto the sandy beach. Aradia straightens her shoulders against the nerves fluttering in her stomach - excitement or apprehension or maybe both, no point in distinguishing them now - and hitches up and ties her skirt so it hangs unevenly across her knees. The spray from the waves is colder on her legs than she expected. The cave is easy to spot at least, with an opening at least ten feet high cut into the rock. Rising from the water against the cliff wall are huge blocks of basalt leading towards it, covered nearly all over in barnacles and seaweeds and things she doesn't know the names of, but her heavy boots grip the stone well and keep her from slipping. 

She can see it even halfway along the rocks - the wall just inside the cave's mouth is covered in writing, lines and lines of it from the ceiling down to the floor, and thank goodness for boots that don't slip because she scrambles the last stretch fast as she can. 

The glyphs are dark in black paint near the ceiling and drastically faded about halfway down (probably because of seawater - something about tides and flooding, she never paid much attention when Feferi explained it). Not from a time when the cave was underwater then, since seadweller paint is made to withstand saltwater, but then it might have been a hideout, or a home, or a million other things. Trolls came from the sea, after all, eons and eons ago, and for all she knows this cave could contain clues about the transition of all but the highest castes to land. 

The glyphs are incredible, exactly what she's hoped, but the the long, dark stretch of cave winding into the cliff draws her attention, the thrill of exploration tingling like there are strings tugging her along. Plus, she's eager to move away from the water; this close, the sea makes her a little uneasy. Or perhaps it's just not as interesting as she'd expected, at least not compared to the cave. She whips out her camera and snaps a battery of photos of the glyphs - followed by a leather notebook to scrawl a few of her thoughts, because Troll Indiana Jones always has a notebook full of writing, practicality be damned - before heading further in. 

The stone is damp and dark and leaves a fine grit on her fingertips. The tunnel goes straight back without any forks or offshoots, less than a hundred yards from end to end, she'd estimate. A simple, straightforward cave, but - and she has to give herself a mental pinch again, keep under control this feeling that she could fly from sheer joy alone - it's definitely been lived in. Besides the initial glyphs there is other, different writing, from different writers in different time periods, at least three distinct ones as far as she can tell. There are troll caste symbols every so often that she's sure to take careful note of. There are line drawing depicting lusii and animals she doesn't know (unless, she thinks, they were lusii too...? Did they have different lusii back then, can certain ones go extinct as others evolve?). She observes and touches, takes notes and takes pictures, no inch unstudied. 

She doesn't even notice the creature at first. Which, later, will seem strange since its white body stands out like chalk against the cave wall. She's reached the back end of the cave, where the ceiling is lower and the rock not as smooth, still full of cracks and outcroppings like whatever forces are forming this cave are still chipping away at it. She does not see the creature folded in a fissure taller than she is until it has unfolded into a mass of wings and teeth, until she turns around and it is there.

Aradia screams, and her scream is nothing compared to the shriek this creature lets out, made all the worse for the way it echoes off the walls a hundred times over, hideous and _terrifying_ and leaving Aradia frozen like prey. The beast's wings look like leather stretched over bone, filling the width of the cave with their full span. Between them is a face dominated by a nightmare of inches long teeth, two large, twitching ears atop it's head, and _it doesn't have eyes_ , be it cave-blind or injured or ancient enough that it doesn't need sight, there are only two bluish depressions where its eyes should be. It moves forward on long, bending legs with teeth bared, and adrenaline like a lightening strike jolts Aradia from her stupor. She stumbles back, summons a whip from her strife specibus and swings it haphazardly at her attacker. It lands with a satisfying snap against one outspread wing; the beast shrugs it off, but not without a flinch and a step back, and that is enough for Aradia to turn and run. 

It crashes through the cave after her. The sound of the whip, at least, seems to give it pause, enough to gain a precious second or two each time she snaps it. Everything is a blur of sound and sensation, her feet smacking the rock and her hair flying out behind her, the fearsome shrieks and rush of air as it swoops heart stoppingly close to her back, and this time when she swings the whip behind her the moment twists her body towards it. She sees the whip hit it across the face and it veers screaming into the wall. The sound of the ocean is loud, close, and in her moment of triumph Aradia barrels towards her escape.

Only to find herself ankle deep in water. Water surges into the tunnel with each wave and recedes in dizzy eddies; beyond the mouth of cave she sees nothing but ocean, incomprehensibly vast. (Tides and flooding, she should have known this, she should have _listened_.)

She turns her back on the ocean to face the monster stalking towards her. She doesn't even know what this thing is - she, who knows so well the animals that poke around her dig sites, who can identify the creatures that haunted her fields hundreds of sweeps ago from their bones alone - and it dawns on her she may have gotten in over her head.

On that thought's heels, trickling through her like the frigid water lapping at her legs, is the realization that she might not make it out of this. 

_Ah, well_ , she thinks, as the beast's needlelike teeth get closer. _Maybe someone will find my bones._

She thinks, _maybe now I'll find out where the voices come from._

She thinks, _if my lusus hears voices too maybe I'll still be able to talk to her._

There is another, familiar (bizarrely so, here) noise from behind her. A streak of white flies past - a rush of strong legs and curving horns, all tied up in furious movement. 

Kangaram-mom's heavy tail impacts squarely on the creature's chest. The force sends the thing crashing wildly into the wall with its wings spread wide like a specimen about to be pinned. Kangaram-mom doesn't hestitate; she comes out of her spin with head lowered, letting the momentum and a kick from her powerful legs drive her forward at the creature's body, looking so much like the target it is against the wall. Her horns crash into its wing. There is a sickening crunch, the gut-wrenching noise of flesh and horn and stone and delicate bones being ground together. The beast lets out a shriek of pain that reverberates spectacularly through the cave; Aradia claps her hands over her ears, wanting nothing more than to get away from this screaming creature - wants _her lusus_ to get away from it. She calls out to her, and the sound must cut through the echoes of the beast as its retreats, uninjured wing beating against the wall as it half-flies, half-shuffles back into the darkness, because Kangaram-mom is immediately at her side. 

The adrenaline holding her up crumbles all at once. Aradia locks her arms around her lusus's neck and breathes huge, shuddering breathes into her fur - because she was so sure she was going to die and she didn't, _she didn't_ , she is _alive_. Her lusus is alive and she is _here_. She's saying it out loud she realizes, choking-laughing-gasping "You're here, you're here, you came after me", into her guardian's chest, which is soaking wet and freezing cold, but Kangaram-mom is shaking with relief too and making own adrenaline-high noises and holding her charge, her child as tight as she can. 

The pink moon sinking towards the horizon slants its light in the cave opening, tinting everything in its color. It will be another hour until the tide goes out enough that they can leave, and another yet of being carried in her lusus's arms with dawn hot on their heels until Aradia is safe in bed. But for now she holds on to her lusus, in a cave by the ocean where no one matters but the two of them, where to each other they are the only ones in the world.

\------

Aradia is grounded from leaving the hive for a full perigree.

Halfway through her lusus finds her reclining against the virgin mother grub skull and gives her a book about the ocean. Learn about it, she says. Learn about the sea and its shore and one day, perhaps, we will go together.


End file.
